Peru

Indigenous Rebellions

An upsurge in native discontent and rebellion had
actually
begun to occur in the eighteenth century. To survive their
brutal
subjugation, the indigenous peoples had early on adopted a
variety of strategies but were never as passive as
portrayed in
the scholarly literature until recently. To endure, the
native
Americans did indeed have to adapt to Spanish domination.
As
often as not, however, they found ways of asserting their
own
interests.

After the conquest, the crown had assumed from the
Incas
patrimony over all native land, which it granted in
usufruct to
indigenous community families, in exchange for tribute
payments
and mita labor services. This system became the
basis for
a long-lasting alliance between the colonial state and the
native
communities, bolstered over the years by the elaboration
of a
large body of protective legislation. Crown officials,
such as
the corregidores de indios, were charged with the
responsibility of protecting natives from abuse at the
hands of
the colonists, particularly the alienation of their land
to
private landholders. Nevertheless, the colonists and their
native
allies, the curacas, often in collusion with the
corregidores and local priests, found ways of
circumventing crown laws and gaining control of native
American
lands and labor. To counter such exploitation and to
conserve
their historical rights to the land, many native American
leaders
shrewdly resorted to the legal system. Litigation did not
always
suffice, of course, and Andean history is full of
desperate
native peasant rebellions.

The pace of these uprisings increased dramatically in
the
eighteenth century, with five in the 1740s, eleven in the
1750s,
twenty in the 1760s, and twenty in the 1770s. Their
underlying
causes were largely economic. Land was becoming
increasingly
scarce in the communities because of illegal purchases by
unscrupulous colonists at a time when the indigenous
population
was once again growing after the long, postconquest
demographic
decline. At the same time, the native peasantry felt the
brunt of
higher taxes levied by the crown, part of the general
reform
program initiated by Madrid in the second half of the
eighteenth
century. These increased tax burdens came at a time when
the
highland elite--corregidores, priests,
curacas, and
Hispanicized native landholders--was itself increasing the
level
of surplus extracted from the native American peasant
economy.
According to historian Nils P. Jacobsen, this apparent
tightening
of the colonial "screw" during the eighteenth century led
to the
"over-exploitation" of the native peasantry and the
ensuing
decades of indigenous rebellions.

The culmination of this protest came in 1780 when José
Gabriel Condorcanqui, a wealthy curaca and
mestizo
descendant of Inca ancestors who sympathized with the
oppressed
native peasantry, seized and executed a notoriously
abusive
corregidor near Cusco. Condorcanqui raised a ragtag
army
of tens of thousands of natives, castas, and even a
few
dissident creoles, assuming the name Túpac Amaru II after
the
last Inca, to whom he was related. Drawing on a rising
tide of
Andean millenarianism and nativism, Túpac Amaru II raised
the
specter of some kind of return to a mythic Incaic past
among the
indigenous masses at a time of increased economic
hardship.

Captured by royalist forces in 1781, Condorcanqui was
brought
to trial and, like his namesake, cruelly executed, along
with
several relatives, in the main plaza in Cusco, as a
warning to
others. The rebellion continued, however, and even
expanded into
the Altiplano around Lake Titicaca under the leadership of
his
brother, Diego Cristóbal Túpac Amaru. It was finally
suppressed
in 1782, and in the following years the authorities
undertook to
carry out some of the reforms that the two native leaders
had
advocated.